Skype relief is finally coming with notifications only on the device you're currently using

Skype will soon be doing more to curb notification noise on your devices. The company has announced a new feature, known as "active endpoint" that will contain chat notifications to the device that you're using, rather than alerting every single device. For instance, if you're chatting using Skype on your phone, your computer and tablet will remain silent.

If you are signed in to Skype on multiple devices (a laptop, tablet and a smartphone) and you are sending chat messages to a group of friends from your tablet. Skype will only send new message notifications to your tablet and not to any of your other devices. All of your other devices will remain blissfully silent. You can continue to focus on the most important thing, your conversations, without being disturbed by the bleeping and buzzing from all of your other devices.

When you stop actively using a particular device, all of your other devices will begin receiving notifications once again. Active endpoint will be rolling out to users over the next few weeks. Skype encourages you to update to the latest version of the app on all devices in order to get the best endpoint experience.

What do you think of Skype's efforts to reduce notification headaches? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Reader comments

Skype relief is finally coming with notifications only on the device you're currently using

This isn't a good thing. They're making it behave like Lync, and its an endless annoyance to me and a lot of my end users that messages are only delivered to one device. So you can't be signed in to your phone & computer at the same time, or two computers or whatever, because you might (will) miss messages. They need to fix Lync to notify all endpoints. A FAR better solution, is to notify all endpoints, and then when its accepted / dismissed or whatever, do that on all endpoints as well.

That's not actually what it says: it just says you won't get notifications on all devices, not that you won't be able to view messages on all devices. Personally, I chat with my colleague at work using Skype on our PC's, and I have to use Titanium Backup to "freeze" Skype on my phone while I'm talking to her, to avoid the notifications on my phone (which are much louder than the ones on the PC).

Yeah, its the notifications / IM's I want on all. I dont care if it makes a noise, when your main form of work communication is IM's, missing them doesn't help you, and so not getting notifications on all the devices I may be signed into is a PITA. i'm often signed in at home & my work PC, & phone. Or at least I'd LIKE to be but have to be conscious of where I'm signed in because Microsoft's "active device" BS doesn't work very well.

Finally.. I hope it will operate at least half as good as facebook IM is.. Till now this was the main reason for not being sign in to skype all the time on my phone.. Its just stupid when you chat on pc and the phone goes full retard just next to you.. FB chat is working this way and its REALLY good.. Never ever have I missed a notification :D

Would be really nice if facebook could do this between Android devices too. I had to turn off facebook notifications on my tablet because I can't stand getting 50 chat messages all at once after not turning on my tablet for a few days.

can't you just swipe it to dismiss all 50? This seems to be the same argument that email spam is.. Most like spam filtering, but personally, I'd rather manually delete / actually ignore the spam than miss legitimate email. Regardless, it should be an option, so microshaft is doing it wrong.

ok, so, you don't get emails on all your devices? thats news to me. When I get a new gmail or whatever, I get them everywhere. as it should be. Same as IM's should be, otherwise you will be signed in to some device you forgot about and not get your IM's, or worse, Microsoft will F up and not deliver them where they should be (see Lync).

I'm not talking about email.
I don't get email notifications that I've already read, unlike facebook. I've already read the facebook message from messenger on my phone or a computer, but it sends them all again to my tablet.

that is not the same thing. this is microsoft interpreting what it thinks is the current device you're using and sending the notification ONLY to that device. and when itsa wrong (as it often is, beceause you didn't sign out, or you lost internet connection on a device or whatever), it send it to some device you're not looking at and you dont see it for however long (or ever).

Have you tried using Helium? It works well for backing up app data to various cloud accounts, and you don't have to be rooted to use it. You do have to connect it to a computer via USB to enable backup/restore if you're not rooted, though.

yeah I ment PC - Phone.. I don't use a tablet or more than one phone so I don't know how that works, but at least it doesn't spam the phone all the time when I chat on PC and I make a lot of transitions from one to another as I do with skype.. chatting on PC, need to go somewhere, even in the house, take the phone, come back proceed on pc. And until now I had to sign out of skype on phone every time I used it as it was unbearable.

And yet we are still stuck with an Android experience where users only have the option of being Available or Invisible, and where anyone on our friends list that is online but not explicitly Available is shown as offline. If they can't even give us a useful mobile experience to begin with, this feature is useless because I will only be using Skype on one device: my PC.

This should be a thing for more services. Having my tablet and my smartphone around me, notifications drive me crazy when you get a "Ding!" on three devices.
But, what's even worse, that the notifications won't disappear on the other devices, once you took care of it. This is actually a bigger annoyance.

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